1. Field of the Invention
The specification relates to generating a table from form images. In particular, the specification relates to automatically generating the table, modifying the table in response to queries and providing the table for display.
2. Description of the Background Art
The use of portable computing devices has become commonplace for many users. In addition to having a conventional desktop computer, many users also have some type of portable computing device. Examples of present-day computing devices include electronic devices for reading such as the Reader from Sony Corp., the Kindle from Amazon and the Nook from Barnes & Noble. As memory size becomes smaller, people are increasingly foregoing laptops for tablets, such as the iPad from Apple Computer Inc., the Kindle Fire from Amazon and the Galaxy Tab from Samsung. Smaller portable computing devices such as smartphones are also useful because of their portability. Smartphones include the iPhone from Apple Computer Inc., the Droid from Motorola and the Blackberry from Research in Motion, just to name a few.
Portable computing devices can be used to input information into forms. Users will input information using a stylus and the form will be converted entirely into symbolic information including the stroke information using optical character recognition (OCR) or optical mark recognition (OMR). If a user wants to aggregate the symbolic information from the plurality of forms for subsequent querying and processing, the user has to rely upon the symbolic conversion being effectively carried out for the plurality of forms. However, the symbolic conversion is error prone, particularly for handwritten stroke information and often requires expensive human intervention to correct recognition errors while taking up computing resources that could be used in other ways.